“O’Brien case.”
Gears meshed. The picture materialized. Big woman. Filling the doorway of the small brick house. “Gray sweats,” he recalled.
“Redskins jersey,” Jose added. “Mean like no tomorrow.”
The phone rang. Jose answered. Listened. Hung up.
“Emerson wants to see us.”
Walking down the hallway toward the stairs, Frank noticed a weariness around Jose’s eyes.
“You sleep last night?”
Jose shook his head. “Going home, I stopped by Daddy’s.”
“Oh?”
“He wasn’t home. Mama said he was still at the church.”
A single light far up in the rafters illuminated the altar and pulpit. His father sat in a front pew, head bowed.
Jose put his hand on his father’s shoulder. Titus Phelps reached up and covered his son’s hand with his own.
“Getting late, Daddy.”
His father looked at him, then to the altar. He moved over. Jose sat down beside him.
Titus Phelps paused as if listening to a voice inside himself. “Just sitting here, talking with Jesus.”
“You heard about over on Bayless Place?”
His father turned to him. “You ever wonder, Josephus, what keeps us safe? Truly safe?”
“Go on, Daddy.”
“You’re my oldest son… a policeman. You’re strong… you’re smart. But you can’t keep us safe.”
Titus Phelps listened to his private, inner voice, then nodded in agreement.
“It’s inside us, Josephus, the power to keep ourselves safe. So we don’t have to fear the night. So we can trust our neighbors.” He paused, then, voice picking up momentum, continued: “That power is in us. Each of us. And if we don’t use it, it goes away. And if that happens, we won’t be safe, no matter how many police we have… even if they’re all as strong and as smart as my son.”
The words had rolled through the church toward the farthest pews in the back. Jose knew he’d heard the beginnings of a sermon yet to be preached.
They were now at the stairway. Frank reached out and squeezed Jose’s shoulder. “Let’s see what’s on Emerson’s mind.”
They pushed into Emerson’s outer office at eight-fifteen.
Shana looked up from her computer and frowned petulantly. “He’s been waiting.” She snapped an index finger toward Emerson’s door. The inch-long scarlet fingernail resembled a bloody talon.
Frank felt an acid clot of irritation in his throat.
Emerson stood behind his desk, a green glass slab supported by two matte black metal sawhorses. Resplendent in a creamy silk shirt and an Italian designer tie, he held a folder several inches thick. He studied the contents for a moment or two after Frank and Jose entered. Then he closed the folder and held it up.
“Looks like somebody did some street cleaning.”
“Somebody did murder one,” Jose said.
As if he hadn’t heard or didn’t care, Emerson regarded the closed folder in his hands. “Hodges was a busy boy,” he whispered to himself. He got a sly look that put Frank in mind of something slithering through the grass.
“He’s in cold storage now,” Frank said.
Emerson continued staring thoughtfully at the folder. Then, as if the comment finally registered, he put the folder on his desk and looked at Frank.
“Oh, no. Skeeter’s got one more job to do. A job for us.”
Without having to look, Frank knew that Jose was doing his slow eye-roll. He looked anyway. Jose was.
He looked back at Emerson. Emerson’s eyebrows were raised in a question mark.
“Beg pardon?” Frank asked.
“I said, ‘How many people you think Skeeter clipped?’ ”
“Rounded off to the nearest hundred?”
“Get serious.”
Jose yawned. “Belt-and-suspenders estimate? Fifteen. Twenty. Most of them competitors.”
“Okay. And how many times did he go to trial?” Emerson asked.
“None.” Frank shook his head.
Emerson sat down in his high-backed black leather chair. It looked like it came off the bridge of the starship Enterprise. He tilted back. “And why was that?”
“Why was what?” Jose asked.
“Why didn’t he go to trial?” Emerson eyed the space just in front of him, the question hanging there, rotating slowly in midair. “I’ll tell you why,” he said, eyes still on the question. “Witnesses died, disappeared, or suddenly got Alzheimer’s.”
“Or they’d swear Skeeter was singing in the choir or babysittin’ their kids,” Jose added.
Emerson shifted his gaze to Jose, then to Frank, and back to Jose.
“We have cases where we know Skeeter was involved, but no evidence. But now, like you say, he’s no longer on the street. We don’t have to bring him to trial. We only have to dig a little. Push a little. Bend a little.”
He tilted forward and pushed Skeeter Hodges’s folder across the glass. “So why don’t you two see if some witnesses have reappeared or had a miraculous memory cure?”
“What you want us to do,” Jose said, “is pin a bunch a cold cases on Skeeter so we can make our numbers.”
Emerson’s lips thinned. “I want you two to do some retrospective investigation,” he said tightly. “Bring justice. Is that too much to ask?”
“What you’re asking us to do,” Frank countered, “isn’t investigating, it’s picking through a garbage dump.”
Emerson’s face flushed. He jabbed an index finger at the two detectives.
“You two prima donnas,” he shouted in a strangled voice, “are not… by God… going to fucking define… what your job is in this goddamn department!”
His eyes bulged and his finger trembled as he went on. “There are procedures… recognized procedures… legal procedures… for closing cold cases. And you will damn well get busy, or you will turn in your badges.”
Winded, Emerson paused. “Is that clear?” he asked in a flat, metallic voice.
“Clear…” Jose hesitated, then tacked on a silent “But…?”
“Yes?” Emerson asked.
“You mind if we track down Skeeter’s killer while we’re at it?”
Jose shook his head. “You had to know that was coming,” he said as they walked down the hall from Emerson’s office.
Frank felt the knot of anger tight in his stomach. “Emerson the weatherman.”
“Hunh. Weathervane.”
They stopped at a door with a sign that said “Records-Modus Operandi.” Frank tapped his five-digit access code into a keypad set into the wall beside the door.
Nothing.
Frowning, he entered the numbers again. Again, nothing.
“Damn thing’s fighting you,” Jose said unhelpfully.
Frank mentally went over the access code again. Bank PIN, Social Security number, health insurance group number, frequent flyer account number. “I thought it was only the army that made people into numbers.”
He tried a third time. The door unlocked with a metallic click, and Frank pushed through. Battered ranks of old-fashioned file cabinets filled the left side of the cavernous room. On the right, records analysts sat at four rows of desks. The analysts, mostly women, faced their computer screens with a vacant stare-the empty look of combat veterans who’d seen too much and who knew they were going to see more.
No one looked up as Frank and Jose made their way to a desk in the last row. There, a small-boned woman
